Drew's Hollywood nightmare

Drew Barrymore stars in Perfect Catch based on the Nick Hornby book Fever Pitch.

10 April 2012

Drew Barrymore is tiny, 5ft 4in, with hands and feet the size of a toddler's. She has a babyish face, rather flat, like a plate, and her hair is dyed an unnatural russet brown. She is wearing a grown-up black dress and to break the ice I ask her where it's from. She squirms around to peer at the label.

"Banana Republic!" she squeals (she had worn Versace to the London premiere and for dinner at J Skeekey's a couple of days before, but "it had to go back"). She doesn't like spending lots of money on clothes, or cars (she drives "an unfashionable black one").

But her looks and demeanour are deceiving. When I remind her she is one of the top three most powerful women in Hollywood (she made $20 million for each of the Charlie's Angels films, which as well as starring in she also produced) she feigns surprise but I guess she is really made of titanium. Given that she has never known what it is like not to be famous, or to have parents who care about you, she has had to be.

She is not classically beautiful. I remember shooting a Marie Claire cover with her and Charlie's Angels costars Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu and though she was the one paying their salaries, she kept making self-deprecating remarks about how much sexier they were than her. (At that time she was engaged to comedian Tom Green, and had a plaster on her finger and said that when she wanted to talk to him, she would talk into her plaster; we-ird)

I tell her she looks positively scrawny and she tells me she has taken up running and hiking in Runyan Canyon near her home in the Hollywood hills -"Those buttholes were right; exercise is the only thing that really works."

Her new film is a remake of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (The Boston Red Sox replace Arsenal), directed by the Farrelly brothers and co-starring Jimmy Fallon in the Colin Firth role.

Barrymore is a fine comic actress, and says she is glad, finally, to be playing a woman rather than a post-teen. " Turning 30 did have an effect on me," she says. "I like the maturity of it." I ask if she remembers Madonna turning up at her 12th birthday party. "Oh my God! Madonna, I remember everything, what a blast. She didn't come to my 30th, though," she adds, shrugging.

Her first job was a commercial for dog food; she was 11 months old. She was cast as Gertie in ET by Steven Spielberg, her godfather, at the age of six. She says she never felt like a child, merely a small grown-up, and that "all my friends were adults".

She had adult responsibilities, too. Her mother, Jaid, was a struggling actress who brought her up single-handed in a one-bedroom apartment. Her father, John Barrymore, Jr (Drew's grandfather was the screen legend John Barrymore, who died of cirrhosis of the liver aged 60), was a failed actor, also an alcoholic, who was physically and psychologically abusive and left when Drew was still a baby. And so, she says, she was "always afraid that if I didn't work, we didn't eat".

Drew's father died last year. She had legally separated from both her parents when she was 15, and tells me that until very recently thinking about her family was like "strapping 500lb bricks to my feet and jumping in the water". I ask if she was reconciled with her father before his death.

"Reconciled, yes, I saved myself years of pain making that relationship positive before he left this planet. It was a hard relationship that caused a lot of pain between us but he was a great teacher." Do you think he was proud of you? "I hope so," she says, looking sad.

She had dinner with her mother recently. "Our relationship is much better, almost because of my dad. It taught me to let go of the pain. But it took a little while." Does she live in fear that, along with the Barrymore chin, she has inherited the self-destructive streak?

She did, after all, go into rehab at the age of 13 for addiction to marijuana, alcohol and cocaine. How on earth did she pull herself out of that? "I just love what I do and I love life, and we all find our way if we have the desire to work, to function normally."

Hmmm. She must have had therapy, too. Take this quote: "I love Freud's triangle of the superego, the ego and the id, but I try to live a little more in the id. I try to stay quiet and humble. I am always thinking, how can I turn something negative into something positive?"

Friends helped, too, she says. "I made my own family, absolutely. Family may
not come in a traditional package but it is OK to create a different situation for yourself."

She likes nothing better than to have a group of friends around for dinner and stay up all night playing "pictionary, charades, cranium, taboo, scategories, you name it". Perhaps only now is she allowing herself to be a child. But she is also fiercely ambitious. She formed her own production company, Flower Films, at the age of 19 with Nancy Juvonen, her best friend.

"I just thought to myself, how can I have a totally rocking, awesome, frigging time and be responsible and have the exact life that I desire," she says simply, as if we could all do that.

Not only did she produce the very successful Charlie's Angels films but also money-spinning hits like Never Been Kissed and 50 First Dates, and critical successes including Donnie Darko. Is she a workaholic? Does she put her career before her personal life? "I absolutely have to catch myself if I am spending too much time at work, I have to have a balance. It is hard to make a relationship work but for me it is the ultimate goal."

She had two short-lived marriages; the first to bar-owner Jeremy Thomas, which lasted nine weeks; the second to comic Tom Green, the one with the talking plaster, which lasted only five months. Is she wary about making another commitment? "No, those failures haven't made me wary or bitter. Life is too short not to risk everything."

At the moment she is risking everything with Fabrizio Morretti, the 25-year-old drummer with the Strokes. "I was a fan, and went to one of their shows, and we met. In many ways he has one up on me, he has a strong family and is well educated [Barrymore finds her lack of a formal education frustrating and makes a point of telling me she has read the Iliad]. It is a very harmonious balance."

"He is so smart and so funny, and he makes me and my friends laugh so hard that we just love it when he is around. I have never been with a man who participated so much in my life." At this point, I have to tell her to stop but she looks so crestfallen, I ask her how on earth they make it work, what with her working all the time, and him, constantly on tour.

"It takes patience and empathy, and we understand each other because we have similar lives. I have a wonderful life that I have picked for myself, and you want me to complain about it?"

Is she, finally, happy, sorted, sane? She deserves to be. I ask what keeps her awake at night. She says the worst has already happened to her. "I'm not afraid," she says finally. "I remember I woke up in bed at home, and the house was on fire. My dog woke me up," she says, and I am not sure if she is referring to Vivian, Labs, Flossie or Templeton, "and saved my life. The only thing I could think of saving was my animals, nothing else mattered. You can always buy more stuff."

What on earth can be left to achieve when you have already made more than 35 movies and met the Reagans at the White House? She says she wants to direct and write and paint. Her next film is a serious departure, Lucky You, directed by Curtis Hanson, who got an Oscar-winning performance out of Kim Basinger in LA Confidential.

Does she wish she was offered the parts that always seem to go to Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts? "I've never sat by the phone, waiting," she says. "That is what my childhood gave me. I know how to make things happen for myself."

I read out a line from a recent profile of her, in which it says she has "melancholy nipping around her edges". Do you, still? "Sometimes," she says. "But not today."

The Perfect Catch opens on 12 August.

MORE ABOUT

P Funk

Drew's Hollywood nightmare

Read More